ABSTRACT
The COVID-19-pandemic led to a seismic shift in survey research. Even though online surveys were already highly popular before the pandemic, survey researchers were often sceptical about the applicability of online and web-based surveys. Especially, when dealing with high-quality research concerning larger populations such as nationwide studies that aim to represent general populations. Despite such reservation, many surveys and even established infrastructure programmes switched to online data collection modes during the COVID-19 pandemic, with push-to-web and online access panels more commonly applied in sampling strategies. This chapter outlines a new normal of online survey research discussing the challenges associated with conducting online surveys as primary data collection mode and potential sampling issues. In this new normal, online surveys are applied more commonly for general population surveys compared to before the pandemic. This chapter presents the defining features of online surveys emphasising technology as well as software and discusses the challenges and implications of the new normal for the larger research landscape. Despite the new ubiquity of online survey some challenges remain, and researchers need to be aware of the opportunities and shortcomings of the mode when it comes to future use cases.
